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Blood Red Shoes

When a band releases a self-titled album, it usually means one of two things: they feel like they’ve made their defining statement, or they ran out of ideas for album titles. For Blood Red Shoes, it’s happily the former. “I feel like this is the strongest thing we’ve ever done,” says Steven Ansell, drummer. “It’s the most honest fucking record we’ve ever made. It’s us completely naked.”

‘Blood Red Shoes’ is the band’s fourth album, but the first one they’ve self-produced, having previously worked extensively with Arctic Monkeys producer Mike Crossey (even if Ansell describes using him as a “hotline for when I messed stuff up in ProTools” during the making of this). It marks a shift not only in method, but in location, too: the album was recorded in Berlin. “We wanted to get out of England and write somewhere different,” says Ansell. “We settled on Berlin because it’s cheap, convenient and super easy to get a space to record. And loads of cool records have been made there.”

Despite their nod to the city’s musical history, Brighton/London-based Blood Red Shoes did not set out to ape Bowie’s Berlin period. Instead, they focussed on stripping away the pristine surface of 2012’s third album ‘In Time To Voices’ to return to the raw, rock ‘n’ roll grit at the centre. “Everything was so perfect on our third album, but we realised that the imperfections are what makes our band – that’s what people like about us,” says singer/guitarist Laura Mary Carter. It’s a plan that was solidified on a tour of the USA in April 2013, which interrupted the album’s writing and recording.

“That tour did something to us,” says Ansell. “In most towns outside the major cities, we were really stoked if we got 50 people out. You’re playing this close to someone, no lights or big PAs, no tricks, no big production, nothing to hide behind. It’s just the absolute bare essences of whether you can excite someone by just rocking out. Doing that night after night in the States, we realised that you have to connect to someone just by the sheer energy of what you do, not worrying about singing perfect harmonies. We got back to Berlin and thought, let’s just get drunk and rock out.”

Video footage shared by the band from the recording sessions shows them having a whale of a time: spinning round in chairs, recording drums topless and making plenty of noise. But, say the band, the video doesn’t tell the full story of their 5pm to 4am working days. “They flit between us fucking around and us being really workaholic and focused and talking about nothing but the songs. That’s not on the video because it’s not interesting to look at,” says Ansell.

The freedom of recording on their own terms caused major changes in the way they work. A handful of the songs have improvised lyrics, including ‘Speech Coma' and forthcoming single ‘An Animal’. “A lot of the lyrics this time are totally spontaneous,” says Carter. “It’s a good way of getting at what you’re thinking; you look back and realise what it was all about.” Ansell agrees: “It’s amazing what you come out with, these more subconscious things. I don’t even know what half the fucking words mean.”

Another shift in the lyrics has been a new sense of positivity. "One song in particular, ‘Everything All At Once’, comes from “the idea that you might not even wake up tomorrow, so you might as well experience everything right now.”

It’s perhaps a viewpoint they’ve arrived at with the confidence of having achieved something relatively few bands of their generation have achieved – making it to their fourth album. “I think is an element of luck involved, but mostly it’s because we work our arses off,” says Carter, who also came up with the concept for the album’s sleeve. “We never switch off. We never let anything just happen; we steer everything. A bit control freaky, really.”

Ansell has his own theory: “We’re still a gang!” he says. “I’ve watched bands that start to break up because they get bored of it or they get distracted or cos they start wanting a family. Real life stuff – gross! Bands fragment as a gang, but there’s only two of us. I can’t think of a day we haven’t spoken to each other for at least five years. We hang out even when we’re not doing the band. I consider myself to be part of a very small gang. It’s us against the world, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve lasted.”

Blood Red Shoes have also benefited, says Carter, “because we’ve never been in a scene.” But in the years since their 2008 debut, they have found kinship with other bands, from Pulled Apart By Horses to newcomers Drenge, whose singer Eoin Loveless takes the lead on ‘Wretch’, the B-side to Blood Red Shoes’ comeback single ‘An Animal’. “They’re the next generation two-piece,” says Carter. “When we first met them, Eoin told me he remembered learning our guitar parts when he was 15 and I felt really old!”

A fiercely ambitious band, Blood Red Shoes have clear aims for the album: they want it to appeal to fans old and new, and they want it to power them on another massive tour around the world. Their long-running tours have won them huge audiences from Indonesia to Russia, Australia and beyond.

The most important thing, for Carter and Ansell, is that they’ve rediscovered the passion at their core. “You know like what it felt like when you’re a kid in art class and the teacher goes out and you just throw the paint around?” asks Ansell. “That’s the feeling of freedom that I can hear in the record. It’s really sloppy, and I love that about it.”